Virginia Woolf

Madness and War

The Novelist Emerges, page 2

page 1 of 2

In January of 1916, Woolf and Leonard decided to buy a
house that was closer to London but not in the city proper. The
settled on a house in a London suburb called Richmond and named
their new home Hogarth House. In a moment of hope, they both confessed that
they wanted also to buy a printing press and start their own publishing
house. They resolved to figure out a way to carry out their plan
financially. In February, shortly before The Voyage Out was
to be published, Woolf became manic. Her doctor had diagnosed her
with neurasthenia, but Leonard called it, simply, manic-depression.
Both Woolf and Leonard learned to recognize physical warning signs
that an attack was imminent: severe headaches, insomnia, quickened
pulse, unbearably rapid heartbeat. Woolf's mania manifested itself
in gibberish, a personality shift to uncharacteristic garrulity
and extreme excitement. She'd even become violent and enraged, which
was decidedly unlike the normal Woolf. While Leonard moved their
things into Hogarth House, he put Woolf in a nursing home for a
few days. She slowly returned to normal.

The Voyage Out was finally published
and it was well received. Author E.M. Forster praised it and a
number of book reviewers called it the work of a genius. But Woolf's
happiness was short-lived; in 1916, the Conscription Bill was introduced
in Parliament, and Leonard was facing the possibility of being
drafted. If he were to leave Woolf for duty, most people believed
it would be disastrous for Woolf. However, he managed to slip past
the draft board and stay in London throughout the war.

At this point, Clive and Vanessa lived apart though they
were still married; Clive remained at the home in Bloomsbury and
Vanessa, her affair with Roger Fry over, now lived with Duncan
Grant. Woolf continued to remain close to both Clive and Vanessa,
though she did not show her writing to anyone until it was finished,
even Leonard. However, after a novel was complete, she sent copies
of the manuscript or galleys to everyone she knew and sought their
opinions. Leonard's opinion mattered most to her. Yet Leonard was concerned
by Woolf's dangerous behavior, which seemed to take effect as she
finished a novel or other long work. He became a kind of nurse
to Woolf, limiting the hours she worked each day, capping the number
of visitors who came to see her, and so on. Woolf was grateful
for this kind of structure.

Having recovered from her latest bout with manic-depression, Woolf
set to work on her new novel, Night and Day. In
February of 1917, Lytton Strachey introduce Woolf to a darkly attractive female
writer named Katherine Mansfield. Woolf did not like Katherine
at first, and hardly warmed to her during their tumultuous, prickly
and very complex friendship, which bordered on romantic, frustrated
love. Mansfield would be one of the first authors Leonard and Woolf
published when they finally started Hogarth Press. During World
War One, Leonard and Woolf had finally scraped together enough
cash to buy a second-hand printing press in March 1917. They christened
their brand new publishing house Hogarth, after their home. Although
later they'd be publishing future luminaries like E.M. Forster,
T.S. Eliot and Sigmund Freud, Woolf and Leonard first had to learn
how to operate the press and set the type. Woolf found the physical
tasks of printing invigorating and looked forward to the afternoons
when she set down her pen and joined her husband at the press.

Meanwhile, Woolf continued work on Night and Day, which
she considered an "exercise." She seemed to follow a pattern of
following up a novel of major import with one that she considered
lighter. She considered Night and Day a lighter
book. The first publication to roll off the Hogarth Press was a
collection of two stories, one by Woolf and one by Leonard. They
titled the publication, "Publication No. I: Two Stories." The stories
were "The Mark on the Wall" by Woolf and "Three Jews" by Leonard.
They printed only 150 copies, but it was received quite well.

At the same time, Leonard was becoming involved in what
he called the 1917 Club, a secondary Bloomsbury that met in a building
on Gerrard Street in London's Soho. There, Leonard and other socialist
intellectuals met to swap ideas and theories about the world, economics
and politics. Woolf was not very fond of most of the people at
the 1917 Club, calling the women "cropheads", a reference to the
new hairstyle many "modern" women were wearing in which their bangs
were cut bluntly across their foreheads. On April 14th, 1918, a
woman named Harriet Weaver approached the Woolfs with a hefty manuscript
by an unknown Irish author that she hoped they'd publish. The title
of the book was Ulysses and the young author's
name was James Joyce.